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Sotheby Parke Bernet's 4290 was a landmark sale: the prices realized at the auction will serve as reference points for years to come. Thus in the hierarchy of cash a relatively obscure artist by world standards ranks, for now at least, above any Dutch old master, any English painter, any French impressionist, any American abstract expressionist, any sculptor of any age.
Nor are high prices limited to paintings. Earlier this year auctioneers gaveled record prices for a French snuffbox ($150,000), a Roman glass bowl ($1.9 million), an American weather vane ($25,000), a Louis XV marquetry cabinet ($1.8 million), a Fabergé hippopotamus cigarette lighter ($55,000), a book of photographs ($100,000), a 2nd century A.D Roman head ($94,000). Per auctionem ad astra.
Collectionitis is as pervasive as inflation, as euphoric as a drug high. Its grip reaches far beyond the roseate world of Rembrandts, Sèvres porcelain and Georgian silver. A vast subculture of acquisition is feeding on scarce objects of every conceivable description. Britons are busily unearthing—and auctioneers as busily selling—such objects of dubious virtue as antique typewriters, gramophones and biscuit tins. Americans, with more catholic taste for trivia, have enshrined such unlovely objets trouvés as old flyswatters, orange reamers, apple parers, Kraft cheese jars (a.k.a. "swanky swigs"), Mickey Mousiana, player pianos, Coke bottle tops, beer cans, Barbie dolls, barbed wire and tractor seats—to name only a smattering. Gypsy Rose Lee's mink G string sold for $1,500 to a London banker. In the mid-1920s, the firm of Louis Comfort Tiffany dumped carloads of the then unpopular art nouveau glassware that bears his stamp; a well-preserved rare Tiffany lamp today can be worth up to $150,000. By one estimate, the U.S. boasts 22 million collectors of one kind or another, mostly another. There are no junk stores any more, only antique shoppes.
And so the word "collectibles" has entered the language. To the serious accumulator, a collectible is any object of intrinsic value and aesthetic appeal. Forget the bottle tops. The field by definition includes such esoterica as crystal paperweights and samurai swords, but anything that can loosely be called art draws the richest audience and the fiercest competition for ownership. And the area is continually expanding as fads and fashions change.